Submitted photo Youngstown native Bob George is co-founder of The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which is devoted to preserving recorded music history and other related memorabilia.

Bob George has lots of stories.

The Youngstown native lived in New York during the birth of the punk movement. He did radio shows in England where then-unknown musicians like Ian Curtis of Joy Division would hand him their 45s in hopes of airplay. He stayed at the compound of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, where he slept on the floor with his wives, and he attended the baptism for one of the Gipsy Kings’ children.

He’s traveled through Colombia in search of records, a trip that required protection from members of a drug cartel. And he has a white label promo copy of the Rolling Stones’ debut album on Decca Records UK that was signed by the entire band. He found it underneath a stack of dog urine-soaked newspapers.

George has even more records than he has stories, millions of them.

He is co-founder of The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which has a collection of more than 3 million sound recordings, about 2,500 signed by the artists who made them and all but one without dog urine stains. There also are 30,000 music books and millions of pieces of supporting material — posters, fliers, press kits, sheet music, etc.

ARC has records that can’t be found at the Library of Congress, and resources that have been used by filmmakers ranging from Martin Scorsese to Ken Burns. Scorsese serves on its advisory board along with Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Keith Richards, Paul Simon, Todd Rundgren and Nile Rodgers (David Bowie and Lou Reed are former board members).

“A lot of the people I set up chairs for (at concerts) and did menial things for ended up serving on my board,” George said.

The beginning

The interests in music, art and collecting that led to the creation of the archive started with a childhood in Youngstown and Poland.

“I grew up on Midlothian, the inner city, the wrong side of the tracks, and then my parents did well and we moved to Poland, Ohio, which was pretty ritzy at the time,” George said. “The school band in Poland was the Human Beinz (who went on to have a top 10 hit with “Nobody But Me”). Mike Tatman, who was a friend, played drums with them.”

George remembered buying music at Record Rendezvous, hearing Boots Bell on the radio and being a member of the Carousel Teen Club. He still has his membership card. And the first autograph he ever got was from young actor Sue Lyon at a screening of “Lolita” at what is now Powers Auditorium.

Art also was a major interest growing up.

“Mrs. Butler, whose family started the Butler (Institute of American Art), lived right outside of Poland,” George said. “I would go there on Saturdays. She had a barn set up that was refurbished and had art materials there for kids to play with. That really got me started. And my uncle, Jon Naberezny, was head of the art department at Youngstown State for a while and has pieces in the Butler.”

After graduating from Poland in 1967 or ’68 (George couldn’t remember which year), he went to the University of Michigan, where he studied art and also worked at Canterbury House, an Episcopal campus ministry that also hosted concerts.

There he set up chairs for shows by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and where he saw Detroit-area acts like Commander Cody and Iggy Pop & the Stooges.

New York

In 1974 George got a scholarship from the Whitney Museum to study in New York.

“The Whitney was great,” George said. “They gave me a 3,000-square-foot studio, seminars … They didn’t care what art you made, but they wanted you to understand how the art world worked, which made me want to not be an artist.”

Through the program, he met people like composer Philip Glass and performance artist Laurie Anderson, and he moved to the city at a time when its punk rock scene was exploding.

“I got to be a hippie and a punk,” George said. ” Nobody was famous then. There was only one restaurant in lower Manhattan and everyone showed up there at the end of the day. I got to meet David Bowie and Lou Reed and everybody in that scene, David Byrne. That was really cool. You didn’t have to talk to their handlers first.”

George started collecting the music being made at the time, in many cases 45s that were self-released or put out on small labels in limited quantities.

That led to creating with Martha DeFoe “Volume: International Discography of the New Wave,” the first comprehensive catalog of the music from that underground scene, and the book led to an invitation to do radio shows for renowned BBC DJ John Peel.

George also tried to help his friend Anderson get a label deal for her experimental song “O Superman.” When Seymour Stein (Sire Records), Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic Records) and Richard Branson (Virgin Records) turned him down, he created his own label and released it himself.

The eight-minute song made it to number two on the UK charts and was a hit in several other countries. George said his only artistic contribution to the song was making it longer, so it would generate more royalties from that UK airplay.

The start of the archive

Through these different paths as a fan, DJ and label owner, George amassed a personal collection of about 47,000 records.

“Once I did the book, everyone was sending me records,” he said. “A friend who started the archive with me, David Wheeler, said, ‘We’ve got to save this. This stuff is going to disappear. It’s very ephemeral.’

“Nobody wanted my records. I had mostly punk, reggae, world music, artistic and experimental stuff and hip hop. In ’84, ’85, I tried to give it away — Lincoln Center, Library of Congress, NYU (New York University). Nobody was interested. If you put all of that together. That’s kind of what music is today.”

ARChive spends about $10,000 a year on new acquisitions. The overwhelming majority of the collection came through donations.

Agent, producer and label owner Jeep Holland, who George met in Detroit, donated his collection of 125,000 albums. It was so big, it was causing his Boston-area home to sink from the weight of it (that’s also where George found that signed Rolling Stones album).

Keith Richards has donated his collection of blues recordings. New York Times critics John Rockwell and Jon Pareles have donated their personal collections.

Looking to move

The ARChive of Contemporary Music currently is located in Hyde Park, N.Y. The building was donated, George said, but it’s in an area that is zoned agricultural with little parking, and it’s not the kind of neighborhood where folks want semi-trailer trucks coming and going with the latest massive collection being donated.

The archive is not open to the general public and can’t be at its current location, so the search is underway for a new home.

When reminded that there are many big, empty buildings in his hometown, George said, “If you have a 100,000-square-foot building in great shape, $10 million to donate and someone in town who has the clout and power to get it done, we’ll be glad to move.”

Essentially, the archive is looking for a donor on par with James Smithson, who 185 years ago donated the money that created the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

George believes the archive’s collection is as important to preserve as the items in the Smithsonian’s collections. While they have worked with the Internet Archive to digitize portions of their recordings, but digital storage companies go out of business, data gets corrupted, CDs and DVDs deteriorate.

“We have this debate — which is going to last longer, the physical item or the digital version? One nice thing about vinyl, it never disappears. It gets dirty, but the information doesn’t get lost from oxidation, dropouts. CDs are not mechanical. Anything that’s not mechanical, it can’t possibly be preserved. You can’t build a chip at home, but you can take a bicycle wheel, a rubber band, a cone of paper and a bundle of sewing needles and you can play that record.”

Once that benefactor and new location is found, George would like to return to being a globe-traveling searcher of new sounds and new music.

While being surrounded by every possible record one can imagine sounds like a dream job for many, George said his days don’t have much to do with listening to music.

“I’ve become a petty bureaucrat who’s trying to keep it alive … I really don’t want to run a big institution. In the ’80s I had my best time,” he said, as he rattled off a few of the many countries he’s visited and people he’s met. “That’s what I really enjoy.”